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“Pillion,” a gay B.D.S.M.-themed romantic comedy, begins, fittingly, with a song of submission. As the camera speeds down a road at night, we hear the lovesick lyrics of the Italian singer Betty Curtis’s 1962 hit “Chariot.” You might recall the song from “Goodfellas” (1990), playing over the mobster Henry Hill’s haphazard courtship of his future wife, Karen. Or you might flash back to “Sister Act” (1992), in which a choir of nuns converted the song into a sacred anthem of praise (“I will follow him / Follow him wherever he may go”). It’s hard to say which of these associations is nearer the mark. Does “Pillion,” like “Goodfellas,” chart the rocky relationship between a cocksure ruffian and a wide-eyed naïf? Or does the film, like “Sister Act,” illuminate the private rituals of a niche subculture, whose devotees perform unquestioning acts of service while dutifully garbed in black?

The novitiate, in this case, is Colin Smith (Harry Melling), a genial young man from the southeast London suburb of Bromley. Colin works in parking enforcement, sings in a barbershop quartet, and lives at home with his endlessly supportive parents, Peggy (Lesley Sharp) and Pete (Douglas Hodge), who just want him to settle down with a nice boyfriend. But Colin doesn’t settle down; he rides off. Not into the sunset—Bromley doesn’t seem to get many—but clinging tightly to Ray, a tall, dreamy blond motorcyclist. Ray is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who has never looked more like a Nordic god than he does here: immaculately chiselled, and as disdainful of small talk as he is impervious to chilly weather. The two men first lock eyes in a pub on a winter’s night, where Colin is instantly smitten. What Ray sees in Colin is initially more mysterious. They meet again on Christmas, wandering from an empty town square into a side alley; a package is unzipped, and gifts are furtively exchanged. The director and screenwriter Harry Lighton, making his feature-film début, isn’t coy about any of it, though he’s sly enough to plant some foreshadowing in a nearby coffee-shop window: “Taste the Christmas Comforts.”

The plot is basically “Fifty Shades of Ray.” The hunky biker is a sexual dominant in search of a submissive, and this first encounter is a test of Colin’s prowess, stamina, and commitment to his master’s pleasure. An outdoor blow job is one thing—and no small thing, from the sound of Colin’s happy choking noises—but will he also, say, lick Ray’s boots on command and like it? (He will.) And how will he respond when, a few days later, Ray brings him to a sparsely furnished duplex, where Colin is expected to cook dinner and keep off the furniture—even to the point of sleeping on a rug, at the foot of Ray’s bed? Colin goes along with it, and the next day’s activities are his reward: a hot and heavy wrestling match, full of crotch-squeezing, ass-baring calisthenics, plus a consummation that produces more pain than pleasure. After the fun and games, Ray is all business once more. “Buy yourself a butt plug,” he says. “You’re too tight.” Colin replies, “Yeah! Yeah, yeah, um . . . lovely. That sounds like a plan.”

The beauty of Melling’s performance lies in the exquisite phrasing and timing of that “um . . . lovely,” which blends excitement, awkwardness, confusion, and curiosity in exquisitely calibrated proportions. Melling is something of a rarity among movie actors, a distinctive-looking chameleon. Those of us who first encountered him onscreen as Harry Potter’s oafish, spoiled cousin, Dudley Dursley, may not have even recognized him in his later, better roles, several of which—a sleuthing Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Pale Blue Eye” (2022); an evil pharmaceuticals C.E.O., in “The Old Guard” (2020)—played on his air of gnomish cunning, his gimlet-eyed stare. “Pillion” represents another sharp left turn for the actor. To point out that Colin isn’t a conventional romantic lead is also to note, redundantly, that this movie isn’t a conventional romance.

Is it a romance at all? The two parties would disagree. “That’s not what this is,” Ray declares, with some exasperation but also a flicker of tenderness, after Colin tells him, “I love you.” Their bond is founded on a narrow principle of sexual gratification and governed by a strict imbalance of power: firm directives from Ray, effusive accommodations from Colin. Before long, Colin has buzzed his hair and fallen in with Ray’s biker gang, many of whose members are paired off in sub-dom dyads of their own. The group dynamics carry richly suggestive undercurrents of jealousy and camaraderie, though Lighton, for all the quasi-anthropological curiosity and matter-of-fact sexual candor of his vision, doesn’t flesh this out in great depth. (There is, however, a funny-melancholy scene in which Colin compares notes with another submissive, played by Jake Shears.) Lighton uses these dynamics, instead, to sow a seed of individual rebellion. Sooner or later, we sense, Colin will consider the terms of his agreement with Ray and decide that, after months of unerring obedience, some personal transgression of his own is in order.

No such revolt occurs in Adam Mars-Jones’s novel “Box Hill,” from which “Pillion” was adapted. The book, which bears the subtitle “A Story of Low Self-Esteem” and is set during the nineteen-seventies, is a sliver of a tale—slender yet devastatingly sharp. When we first meet Mars-Jones’s Colin, he’s a sexually inexperienced eighteen-year-old, who stumbles across Ray on Box Hill, a gay cruising ground. Their relationship lasts several years, only to be ended by tragedy, though some would see the end as a mercy: the Ray we meet on the page is not just demanding and inconsiderate but abusive. “What had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape,” the book’s Colin tells us after Ray penetrates him for the first time, sans preamble or lubricant. “I’d said he could do anything with me. I know that. But some things can’t be consented to.”

“Pillion” never directly broaches the question of consent—but, crucially, nothing that Colin experiences, whether physical discomfort or emotional neglect, can be construed as a violation. What the director has done, in effect, is Lighton the mood. He has updated the setting to a present-day moment that is less closeted and more kink-friendly, if dominant-submissive romances as different as “Babygirl” (2024) and “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015) are any indication. (“Pillion” has also aged Colin well past his teen-age years; although the character’s age is never specified, Melling is thirty-six.) Much of the onscreen conflict involves Colin’s parents, who, unlike their literary counterparts, know that their son is gay and take an embarrassingly overactive role in nurturing his love life. But Lighton doesn’t treat them as sitcom-ish meddlers. Peggy, wonderfully played by Sharp, is terminally ill, and she’s fiercely determined to insure that Colin is well taken care of after she’s gone. That puts her at odds with Ray, whose investment in her son hinges on a brusque, performative disregard for Colin’s happiness.

Ray can be cruelly withholding. He reveals nothing about where he’s from or what he does for a living, and he reserves what affection he has for his dog and his motorcycle. But he isn’t abusive, and there’s little suggestion of menace or danger in Skarsgård’s performance. The actor has already shown us what that would look like: in the series “Big Little Lies,” he played a husband and father whose taste for kink masked a terrifying hunger for inflicting pain. Ray, by contrast, is a figure of intermittent but undeniable mirth—a citadel of physical perfection whose sublimity occasionally touches the ridiculous. It’s both amusing and clarifying to see him in moments of downtime, when he sits around the apartment wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and elegant little specs. Playing a slow, faltering rendition of “Gymnopédie No. 1” on a keyboard or burying his nose in a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel, he’s practically a caricature of latent male sophistication and sensitivity, momentarily freed from all that sweat and leather.

Skarsgård wrings so much effortless dom-com gold from Ray’s show of intransigence that it’s almost a shock to see the performance deepen; he makes the character’s emotional limitations remarkably expressive. It should perhaps come as no surprise to learn that Ray’s extreme need for control is rooted in insecurity, and that nothing threatens him more than the reality of his own feelings—the possibility that he might actually want more from Colin than just a physical release. “Pillion” does turn out to be a romance after all, or at least more of one than Ray can admit or allow. The movie’s ending deviates, significantly and generously, from Mars-Jones’s much bleaker conclusion: Colin’s heart may be broken, but something within him has undeniably strengthened. He hasn’t lost what Ray calls his “aptitude for devotion,” or his genius for submission. But, in all the ways that count, he is riding pillion no longer. ♦

The lives of working people in the city—above all, New York City—have been at the center of movies from the industry’s start, as seen in “Tenement Stories,” Film Forum’s teeming series of fifty-plus films, running Feb. 6-26. The series spans more than a century of cinema, from the nineteen-tens to last year, with the 2025 documentary “Heat,” directed by Aicha Cherif, about three women whose housing becomes tenuous in the gentrifying Lower East Side. Some of the most harshly realistic visions of poverty are found in the program’s earliest features: Raoul Walsh’s “Regeneration” (1915) and Lois Weber’s “Shoes” (1916), in which youths are driven to gangsterism and sex work, respectively, in households run to ruin by idle fathers.

Mabel Cheung’s “The Illegal Immigrant,” from 1985.Photograph courtesy Celestial Pictures

There are comedies and romances, too, such as Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord” (1970), with a script by Bill Gunn, and tales of artists in the downbeat city, such as Shirley Clarke’s “The Connection” (1961), which features the jazz musicians Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd; “Pull My Daisy” (1959), with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; and “Frownland” (2007), directed by Ronald Bronstein (who co-wrote “Marty Supreme” and “Uncut Gems”).

But the heart of the series is the immigrant experience—and its frequent burden of social exclusion—as in Allan Dwan’s “East Side, West Side” (1927), in which struggling Jewish and Irish neighbors clash and coöperate; Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy-set crime thriller “Mean Streets” and his documentary “Italianamerican,” a discussion with his parents, who were born in Sicily; and the drama “El Super,” directed by Leon Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, which shows a Cuban family struggling to fit into American life. And in Mabel Cheung’s drama “The Illegal Immigrant” (1985), set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a young man from Canton, facing deportation, arranges a paid marriage while contending with pressure from local gangsters.—Richard Brody

The tradition of sculptural assemblage departs from the proposition that things are inasmuch as they are together. The Jamaican-born sculptor Arthur Simms takes this notion to its maximum tension: found objects are bound together by dense skeins of rope that resemble mycelial networks or unusually thick cobwebs. Though the rope suggests tidy metaphors of unity, coherence, and formal integrity, a playful but insistent messiness effloresces in Simms’s entanglements, throwing any seeming wholeness into question. Among the objects pulled together by the ropes are kids’ scooters and bikes, liquor bottles, toys: elements of childish nostalgia and adult revelry alike that charge the sculptural bodies with a rambunctiousness that refuses containment.—Zoë Hopkins (Karma; through Feb. 14.)

Elevator Repair Service, the trickster troupe who created “Gatz,” a delirious reading of “The Great Gatsby,” ups the ante by adapting James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” squeezed to just under three hours and twenty thousand words. That’s like compressing a planet into a bouillon cube, but, even so, the soup is mighty tasty. The show opens as a reading, with the cast jolting whenever they fast-forward, but by Act II, they’re whirling around the stage, performing outlandish octuplet births and potato seductions. Vin Knight is affecting as Leopold Bloom, an anxious outsider in his city, his subconscious, and his leaky body; Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. The show will be catnip for Joyce-heads, but there are pleasures for everyone, or, as Molly might put it: thumbs up.—Emily Nussbaum (Public Theatre; through March 1.)

Hatchie.Photograph by Bianca Edwards

The Australian singer-songwriter Hatchie has steadily built a little dream-pop world suspended between the synth music of Kylie Minogue and the washed-out guitars of the Cocteau Twins. Following stints in a few Brisbane indie bands, in 2017, Harriette Pilbeam uploaded the song “Try” to the website of the radio station Triple J under her family nickname, and then settled into a woozy shoegaze sound, working with her partner, Joe Agius, and the producer Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan). Her new album, “Liquorice,” is her most sensational; co-produced by Agius and Melina Duterte (who performs as Jay Som), the LP is feverish and intimate. Alongside Agius and the Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, Hatchie blows up her dazed songs of dysphoric romance to magnificent proportions.—Sheldon Pearce (Music Hall of Williamsburg; Feb. 7.)

This year’s Dance on Camera Festival showcases thirty-three films from twelve countries. “Rojo Clavel,” one of seven features, is a moving portrait of Manuel Liñan, a dancer who has reshaped the rigid gender tropes ingrained in flamenco in order to express his experience as a gay man. The first of three programs of shorts includes an extraordinary film by Grigory Dobrygin of Natalia Osipova dancing Frederick Ashton’s “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan” in an empty studio. Shot closeup, with every muscle visible, Osipova is freedom and impulse personified. “Risa,” on a program entitled “Portraits,” offers a stylish and unsentimental glimpse into the inner world of the modern dancer and lifelong teacher Risa Steinberg.—Marina Harss (Symphony Space; Feb. 6-9.)

“Family a.k.a. Family Portrait,” 1970.Art work © Marcia Marcus / ARS / Courtesy Olney Gleason; Photograph by Charlie Rubin

Marcia Marcus’s paintings are strange, in the best way. She rendered people in muted tones and gray scale, so that they appear stuck in the past, and her subjects—often herself—look out with deadpan expressions, giving them an air of confrontation. She compressed space, too, making distances dissolve and physical relationships seem out of proportion. Marcus started painting in the nineteen-fifties. Over the decades, her work—including the twelve pieces in the show “Mirror Image”—fell in and out of fashion, but gained momentum again before she died, last year. Rightfully so. Works such as the exhibition’s titular self-portrait give figurative painting, whose recent dominance has begun to wear thin, a refresh: they treat the medium not as a form of testimonial but as an inventive conceptual project.—Jillian Steinhauer (Olney Gleason; through Feb. 14.)

Many of the best international films of recent years have failed to get U.S. distribution; one of them, P. S. Vinothraj’s “Pebbles,” which premièred at festivals in 2021, is now streaming on MUBI. It’s a drama of the intimate politics of gender in rural Tamil Nadu, where a hard-drinking man drags his young son to a distant village in order to force his estranged wife to return home. As the man brawls with his in-laws, the boy is caught between two worlds, of male rage and female subjection. The pair’s embittered travel in the high heat of a sunbaked plain is punctuated with scenes of women’s struggles to provide the bare necessities; Vinothraj films harsh journeys and hard labor with extraordinary visual variety and emotional nuance.—R.B. (Reviewed in April, 2021.)

Illustration by Patricia Bolaños

The namesake of Haswell Green’s, an Irish-inflected bar and music venue in the theatre district, is Andrew Haswell Green. Who? “The father of New York City,” according to a biography in the establishment’s leather-bound drinks menu, which details Green’s creation of the city’s five-borough structure and his role as a developer of Central Park and the Met museum. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. The clientele is likewise wide-ranging. Tourists from California, Brazil, you name it. Regulars from the neighborhood. Wild cards, such as two people in feathered bowler hats who were eating pizza during a weekly show by a pop-rock cover band called the Big Woozy. One of the pizza-eaters, the lead singer announced, was Micki Free, a member, in the eighties, of the Grammy-winning band Shalamar, whom he summoned onstage. Taking a microphone, Free warned the crowd, “It’s gonna get sexy. Is that all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he launched into Prince’s “Kiss,” his falsetto eerily reminiscent of the original. Afterward, things got a little too sexy. A sloshed suited man went from lurching around the dance floor to tilting himself at women by way of introduction. Security intervened, taking him to pay his tab, which he attempted to do with his I.D., and escorting him out of the bar, then escorting him out again after he reëntered. The band played on. Something quintessentially New York hovered about the place, with its mashup of people from all over and its diner-like drinks list, its capacity to surprise and then carry on. Albeit a humbler site than the Park and the Met, it’s no less worthy a bearer of Green’s legacy.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Listen to the whales
• The pleasures of friction-maxxing
• Minnie Driver’s guide to kissing

Before you enter “An Ark,” a “mixed reality” performance at the Shed, you check your coat and, more oddly, your shoes. Contact lenses are recommended. Inside, there are three concentric circles of chairs arranged on a red carpet and, overhead, a white globe resembling a hot-air balloon. A docent explained that, through my virtual-reality headset, I would see four more chairs—and, ideally, they shouldn’t float. They did float, so she adjusted the tech.

Minor glitches aside, the V.R. experience was crisply efficient, like a good day at the D.M.V. Express. Unfortunately, the show itself, directed by Sarah Frankcom, was blander stuff: less mind-bending spectacle, more earnest meditation. After an ominous rumble, four holographic figures apparated, then sat in their virtual chairs, facing me. One of them was Ian McKellen, draped in Jedi white, who purred, “Don’t panic.” What followed was forty-seven minutes of an existential monologue by the British playwright Simon Stephens, chorally divided among the quartet: two twinkly elders, played by McKellen and Golda Rosheuvel; a young woman, who seemed skeptical and hostile and therefore more relatable, played by Rosie Sheehy; and a young man who was beatific and then melancholy, played by Arinzé Kene. The gist was that I had died and was being welcomed to the afterlife, via an orientation that required the characters to list details of my life, or someone’s life—or really, everyone’s life—beginning at birth. “You’ll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here,” one mentor said, earnestly. “They matter,” another said.

Mostly, this meant a litany of sensations (“Cherry blossom. Chocolate milk. Night terrors”) and stoner insights: “It is impossible to waste energy. All you can do is pass it on.” Maybe, but my mind kept hot-air-ballooning away to my fellow-cultists, who were facing their own spiritual co-op boards. In Manhattan, we don’t stare at celebrities, so I tried to luxuriate in warm, extended eye contact with McKellen, but after a while I resented this faux intimacy. I felt like Carol from the TV show “Pluribus,” trapped by a gooey hive mind, or like Emily Webb, had she remained stuck in the Grover’s Corners cemetery for all of Act III.

Ultimately, the issue was less the goggles than the damp spirit of woo, the regimented serenity and us-ness of it all. In the evening’s single moment of tension, Sheehy’s skeptic upbraided Kene’s character for—I think, it was all a bit elliptical—having killed a girl while driving drunk. He stalked away, later returning without explanation. Twice, the holograms made teasing offers to touch my hand. It was weird, but weird isn’t the same as fun or profound. Mostly, “An Ark” resembled a webinar with a staring contest, one that no human could win.

There will be future applications of “mixed reality,” I’m sure, and I hope they work with funkier material. Personally, I’d rather get clobbered by holographic McKellens than be told not to panic, which just made me miss Douglas Adams. Truly pleasurable interactive theatre requires a touch of panic, or, at least, of raw sensation. In the case of Diane Paulus’s glammy, enjoyably shameless “Masquerade,” a supercut of “The Phantom of the Opera” playing in midtown, this means scarfing cheap champagne, getting frog-marched from ballroom to boudoir, and vibrating as the Phantom belts “The Music of the Night” in your face. At dazzling productions of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Sunset Boulevard,” and “Oedipus,” creators used prerecorded video to help viewers reflect, sometimes literally, on the self-mythologizing mirrors of online life. In a world of deepfakes, ersatz eye contact is small beer.

I got a stronger kick from a little show called “Friday Night Rat Catchers,” which was part of the Under the Radar festival. At one point, the dancer Lena Engelstein, slinky in a violet suit, screamed, “Where are my AirPods?” over and over, sending the audience into hysterics of self-recognition. As she spasmodically leaped around the stage, twitching and gyrating, we roared—until, a few minutes in, she patted the front of her pants. There was one AirPod in each pocket. Shrugging, she put the earbuds in, and then, when a fellow-dancer walked over, she heedlessly tossed them onto the stage, with a clatter. The routine said more about our relationship with tech—and the pleasures of community—than all of “An Ark.”

“Data,” a nifty, twisty Silicon Valley thriller by the young playwright Matthew Libby, was nearly derailed by the pandemic, which bumped it from the stage to a streaming platform. A new production at the Lucille Lortel, directed by Tyne Rafaeli, with lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker and set design by Marsha Ginsberg, is more visceral. It opens with a live game of Ping-Pong, in an industrial space flooded by “BRAT”-green light, giving the audience the vertiginous feeling of having landed amid something both exciting and sickening. The proscenium is framed by a flickering white tube; between scenes, we hear animal growls and house beats. The effect is to slice the play into abrupt tableaux, as if we were blinking our eyes, trying to wake from a nightmare.

That’s certainly the case for the protagonist, Maneesh, a naïve, stressed-out coder who’s hoping to satisfy his immigrant parents by taking a low-pressure job in U.X., or user experience, at a company called Athena. His brogrammer mentor, Jonah, urges him to attend Taco Tuesdays, to network; Riley, a former classmate who bluntly clarifies that she’s more an acquaintance than a friend, pushes him to join the “real” engineers in data analytics. A secret project is in the works, involving data mining, and when Alex, their “thought leader” boss, gets Maneesh to jump jobs, he finds himself standing at the edge of a moral cliff.

Libby, who came of age in Silicon Valley and studied cognitive science at Stanford before getting an M.F.A. in dramatic writing at N.Y.U., knows this world: in his junior year, he just missed landing an internship at Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, years before it evolved, “Gremlins”-like, into a partner of ice. As a teen-ager, Libby was influenced by Aaron Sorkin and Annie Baker, a real Devil-on-one-shoulder, angel-on-the-other situation. Like a Sorkin script, “Data” moves fast and underlines a few themes too thickly. But it also has real verve as a play of ideas, exploring ethical questions—about collusion, whistle-blowing, and what it means to be a true American—that are queasily timely. If Libby’s tone is less scathing than that of, say, Jesse Armstrong’s HBO movie “Mountainhead,” a satire of libertarian billionaires, it captures something equally meaningful: the quarter-life crisis of STEM kids struggling, in the age of DOGE, to sort out how responsible they are for the systems they build. The play’s big revelation, which drew a gasp from the audience, may have felt like sci-fi when Libby began writing “Data,” nearly a decade ago; now it feels like a documentary.

As Maneesh, the doe-eyed Disney Channel alum Karan Brar exudes depressed decency but never quite taps into the messy turmoil that might complicate the coder’s choices. Brandon Flynn is likably hot as the U.X. mediocrity, the worst kind of extrovert; Justin H. Min is effectively silky as their boss, who manipulates Maneesh by bonding over their immigrant roots. But the show’s standout is Sophia Lillis, whose distraught, morally inflamed Riley is the play’s most original figure. Stooped, uptight, and explosive, she’s a smart girl who blurts out rude remarks and then groans in apology, like Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News.” Riley has reasons to worry—student loans, for one thing—and she also has an irrepressible Cassandra streak. “You don’t think you were involved when you worked down the hall?” she snaps at Maneesh.

Lillis adds a welcome flash of danger to the play, a feeling that anything could happen. It’s the same spontaneity suggested by those Ping-Pong games, with their flickers of nostalgia: for the video game Pong, for the innocent give-and-take of online debate, and for the fantasy of a tech job with free snacks and a cozy game room, back when coding felt like a hip, lucrative way to save the world. ♦

One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word “unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there has been a tendency to overlook the ways in which various of the President’s policies are consistent with those of some of the darker moments of American history.

Trump’s mendacity and conspiratorial reasoning, along with his contempt for journalism, recall the attitudes of Senator Joseph McCarthy—a connection that some early Trump observers attributed to the fact that the Senator’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn, became something of a mentor to Trump in the nineteen-seventies. Trump’s incendiary populism mirrors the tradition of reactionary populists from Senator Thomas Watson to Governor George Wallace. The aggressive xenophobia of Trump’s immigration policies shares DNA with the anti-immigration raids launched by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The point is not simply that so much of what Trump represents is unprecedented as that, where his actions have echoes from the past, they are almost universally troubling.

Difficult history has been particularly significant in recent weeks, as the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis has come to increasingly resemble an armed occupation. The upheaval there is notable not only for the violence of federal agents who killed two American citizens—one of whom, Renee Good, was unarmed, and the other of whom, Alex Pretti, appears to have been disarmed of a gun he was legally permitted to carry before agents fired off at least ten shots—but for the recalcitrance of residents who braved below-zero temperatures to protest the government’s actions. The protesters’ sense of democracy, as they articulate it in interviews, the signs they carry, and the graffiti on public buildings, is all strikingly local. Note the frequency of the use of the word “neighbor” in people’s explanations for why they’ve taken to the streets. As a witness to Pretti’s death explained in a lawsuit filed against the D.H.S. Secretary, Kristi Noem, and others, “I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value.” This is not, of course, the first time that the enforcement of a federal detention policy has collided with a community’s sense of responsibility for its members, though the precedent is not comforting.

During the tumultuous period that preceded the Civil War, the United States passed a series of bills that came to be collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise allowed for California’s entry into the Union as a free state, and outlawed the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. The most controversial element of the legislation, however, was the Fugitive Slave Act. Article IV of the Constitution already required that an enslaved person who escaped into a free state be returned to bondage, but the 1850 law created a federal bureaucracy to facilitate it. As the historian Andrew Delbanco notes in his book “The War Before the War,” a history of the national conflict over fugitive slaves, the Compromise “was meant to be a remedy and a salve, but it turned out to be an incendiary event that lit the fuse that led to civil war.”

The law was heavily weighted, in that it offered a fee of ten dollars to magistrates who ruled that an individual should be returned to slavery, but only five to those who ruled that the person should remain free. Even more controversially, it charged federal commissioners with enforcing the law, and they worked with loosely regulated agents, who made it their own business to track down fugitives and return them to slavery. These so-deemed slave catchers had a long reputation for conducting rogue operations. As Delbanco notes, “Even free black people in the North—including those who had never been enslaved—found their lives infused with the terror of being seized and deported on the pretext that they had once belonged to someone in the South.” Given that as many as a hundred thousand people escaped slavery and found refuge in free states in the nineteenth century, fugitives represented a population residing illegally within largely sympathetic communities—a fact that incensed hard-liners on the slavery issue. Seeking a middle ground, Senator Henry Clay, of Kentucky, who introduced the Compromise, imagined that the law would placate irate Southerners who fumed at the monetary losses that escaped slaves represented, but few lawmakers foresaw the impact that it would have in the North.

Even in the free states, attitudes toward slavery were complicated. A raft of economic, social, and religious dynamics had resulted in the abolition or prohibition of slavery, but that did not automatically mean that the entire population favored racial equality or abolition in general. (When Northern states began abolishing slavery after the American Revolution, many slaveholders opted to sell their chattel to buyers in the South rather than manumit them.) At the same time, the Fugitive Slave Act replaced the more complicated questions about the institution with a single, less complicated one: Were Northerners prepared to watch their neighbors, many of whom had lived in their communities for years, be violently removed from their homes or grabbed off the streets? For many, the answer was no.

Attempted enforcement of the law met with immediate resistance. In 1851, an armed mob surrounded a group of agents led by a slaveholder, Edward Gorsuch, in Christiana, Pennsylvania, who were attempting to return four fugitives to his farm, in Maryland; Gorsuch was shot and killed. The four, along with others who participated in the standoff, escaped, and some reached Canada with the assistance of Frederick Douglass. In Syracuse, New York, Oberlin, Ohio, and other cities, crowds swarmed jails where captured fugitives were held in other successful efforts to free them, at the risk of their own prosecution. (In 1854, fifty thousand people filled the streets of Boston, a center of abolitionist resistance, to protest against returning Anthony Burns, a Black man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, to that state. (When that effort failed, a group privately purchased Burns’s freedom and facilitated his return to Massachusetts.)

The significance of this history is twofold. The Fugitive Slave Act was rhetorically useful for a certain element of the political class, but for most people it took an issue that they may have felt ambivalent about—or hadn’t much thought about at all—and gave them a direct, visceral reason to feel very strongly about it. Slavery might have been an abstract national concern, but the fate of a neighbor, whom people may have depended upon as a part of their community, was very much a personal one. Something akin to that reaction is occurring in communities across the U.S. now, as social-media feeds fill with images of children being harassed by ICE agents as they leave school and of a five-year-old boy being detained, and of adults being shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed or pulled from their cars after agents smash the windows. The Fugitive Slave Act is remembered by historians for its ironic effect: designed as a means of cooling the simmering regional tensions over slavery, the law effectively made it the most contentious issue facing the nation. It pushed Americans toward the realization that the nation was bound in what William Seward later termed an “irrepressible conflict.”

In Minnesota, the distance between the past and the present is small. Americans hold complex views on immigration and deportation, but as early as last summer more than sixty per cent of Americans opposed undocumented immigrants being sent to the CECOT facility in El Salvador, where they were likely to suffer abuse. (It’s significant that the Administration’s campaign in Minneapolis began amid renewed discussions of the reported torture that detainees experienced after being deported there.) In this regard, many Americans are asking themselves the same question that an earlier generation asked a hundred and seventy-six years ago. Judging by the bundled, frostbitten crowds that return to the streets day after day despite the violence directed at them, they have come to the same answer. ♦

One recent afternoon, in a linoleum-floored room at an elementary school in Minneapolis, the mother of a first grader and third grader sorted through sacks of potatoes and oranges. These and other groceries would be distributed to families who’d been too afraid to send their children to school in the weeks since an influx of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement began operations in the city, in December. The day before, a group from a local fitness studio—“a bunch of, like, hot, ripped spinning instructors,” the mom called them—had arrived with eight carloads of donated food. The most vulnerable part of the process, she explained, is the home delivery: “You can just imagine that it’s super sensitive, because you’re getting people’s addresses.” She recalled the first time she did a drop-off. “I see a literal ICE agent walking around, and he just walks right past me. I’m just not on his radar,” she said. She is white, and had on a red University of Wisconsin T-shirt. “But, yeah, I go up to this apartment, and this mom was on the verge of tears, who’s been at home with her kids in a stuffy apartment for, like, a month, you know?”

A couple of weeks before winter break, a teacher noticed that a student with immigrant parents had stopped showing up. “That was the first sign that something bigger was happening,” the teacher recalled. The school, which has around five hundred students, does not ask parents to report their immigration status, but more than half the kids are classified as English-language learners. “We have students who are from many different Latin American countries, and then Somali students, African American students, and a small group of white students,” the principal, who asked that the school remain anonymous, said. “We are serving students who are mostly experiencing poverty, so we spend a lot of time with missing learning and making sure that we’re filling that in. Back before this all started, we could really focus on instruction. That’s what we’d like to focus on again.”

Instead, Donald Trump ordered an additional two thousand immigration agents into the city in the new year, bringing the total to three thousand. After January 7th, when a federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and other agents swarmed the grounds of a local high school, metro-area school districts began offering a distance-learning option. As of late January, around forty per cent of the elementary school’s students have been staying home, and many of their families no longer leave the house. School parents have been detained, the principal said, but even those with legal status are staying home, out of fear. “We’ve had a family self-deport,” the principal said. “We’ve had families move out of state just to get away from this level of enforcement here.”

The school began formulating its response to the crisis in December. Meetings were held to figure out how best to assist the families. Laptops and mobile hot spots were distributed. Parents began volunteering their time. A toy drive was arranged to make sure the homebound kids got Christmas presents. A GoFundMe was initiated to cover rent and groceries for families who have stopped going to work; parents and other volunteers are connecting detained parents with legal assistance. Teachers are driving kids to and from school, and have access to an A.I. translation app to convey offers of help to families in their native languages. The mobilization is both semi-organized and overwhelming; the cafeteria’s walk-in refrigerator is stuffed with gallon jugs of milk and cartons of eggs.

The other day, the school was unusually quiet. Its corridors, colorful with children’s art, had phrases of encouragement (“together is always better”) painted on the walls. One hallway had a line of bikes for kids to learn how to ride; a corner had a bin full of cross-country skis for their use. On a lobby bulletin board, photos introduced the members of a “Volunteer Piano Ensemble,” most of them gray-haired, who come and play the piano as children arrive at school.

In a second-floor room bright with winter sunshine, two teachers had consolidated their diminished classes into one. “I see lots of you cleaning up,” one of the teachers said, in a voice indicating a deep reservoir of patience. “I need to see everybody cleaning up. Look at the timer. Just a sliver of time left.”

“I don’t need a bag.”

Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan

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After the children settled on a rug for a math lesson, one of the teachers stepped out into the hall. “I spoke to a mom on the phone yesterday,” the teacher, who is fluent in Spanish, told a visitor. “Her husband was picked up at the courthouse, and he’s in El Paso, Texas.” The family was from Ecuador, and the mother had decided that they would return there. “I mean, her son is a student in my class, and he doesn’t know how to read in his native language, and now he doesn’t know how to read in English, either, because his year has been interrupted,” the teacher said. “And now they’re going home, and I’m scared for them.”

She said she had begged another parent, who works as a maid at a downtown hotel, not to risk going to work; another mother who worked as a hotel maid had already been detained—“by an ICE agent staying at the hotel,” the teacher said. The mother who worked at the downtown hotel would not be dissuaded, even when several others from school intervened. “I said, ‘We will pay your rent. We will bring you groceries. Please do not go to work. It is not safe,’ ” the teacher recalled. “And she just said, ‘I need this job.’ ” The teacher insisted on driving her. “She had us drop her off at a side door of the building,” she said.

Another family with a child at the school was stopped by ICE agents on the way to a prenatal appointment. The mother, who is eight months pregnant, was let go, along with the child; the father, who had a work permit and a pending asylum case, is now being held in El Paso. The school helped connect the family to an immigration lawyer.

A Spanish teacher, an immigrant herself, has been trying to set up a system whereby local families with citizenship make a four-week commitment to be the primary point of contact for one of a hundred and fifty families who are sheltering at home. “This has become an obsession for me,” she said, sitting in a small office, poring over a spreadsheet on a laptop. “My husband says that I’m manic, you know? I don’t sleep.” She pulled up, on her phone, a group text in which two families had been exchanging photos. “When I saw this, I just cried the whole day,” she said. “Just seeing this exchange of, like, this family that could not be any whiter with this adorable Latino family. I mean, this is who our President wants to kick out.”

On January 29th, Tom Homan, the Trump Administration’s “border czar,” announced that the number of federal agents in the state would be reduced, on the condition that state and local law enforcement coöperate with federal immigration enforcement, which local politicians have largely resisted. (Minneapolis and St. Paul have laws restricting such coöperation.) Distance learning is scheduled to end, but the school staff expects that it will be extended. The adults have tried to explain the situation to the children the best they can. The principal said that teachers have incorporated lessons about boycotts and protest. “So they can kind of connect it to that,” the principal said. “The kids know that there’s a way to respond when you feel like something is unjust.”

Down in the linoleum-floored room, the mom in the Wisconsin shirt sorted the donated food into categories. She owns a winter-clothing company, and the post-holiday lull is typically her downtime. But, she said, at the school, the number of “type-A white parents that have some money or flexibility or whatever” is small. “I’m already seeing the burnout in some of the other parents,” she said. Two bundled-up women arrived pushing a cart of groceries, including canned goods. “There’s a little tomato section over there,” the mom said, guiding them. Each family gets fresh produce, shelf-stable items, and a bag of hygiene and cleaning products. “I keep thinking, if I was trapped at home, what I would want,” she said. “And it’s, like, I’d want LaCroix water, and coffee, and, I don’t know, some good popcorn.” ♦

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, says that what’s happening in Minneapolis today—with thousands of armed, masked federal agents terrorizing the community in the name of cracking down on illegal immigrants—is both a “moral abomination” and a “moment of truth for the United States of America.” In the wake of the tragic killings, earlier this month, of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Maryland Democrat and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin praises Minnesotans’ “heroic resistance” and “non-stop creative organizing” as not only the right response to the Trump Administration’s excesses but “a template for national popular victory against the autocrats and authoritarians.”

Speaking out on Thursday, the two members of Congress reflected a national Democratic leadership that—finally, belatedly—seems to have found its collective voice in responding to what Donald Trump has unleashed on America since returning to office a year ago. Some of the President’s most fervent opponents now believe, as the never-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes wrote on Thursday morning, that the recent news out of Minnesota marked a breaking point for “patriotic, non-political normies.” Reflecting a political environment that simply did not exist a week ago in Washington, on Thursday a united Senate Democratic caucus refused to vote for a government funding bill before a Friday deadline, because it includes money for the out-of-control immigration agencies that operate within the Department of Homeland Security. On the ground in Minnesota, meanwhile, Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, announced that he had arrived to dial down the temperature. “President Trump wants this fixed, and I’m going to fix it,” he said.

Is this, then, the inflection point—or whatever you want to call it—that so much of sane America has been waiting for? The beginning of the end of the madness that has gripped our nation?

Would that it were so. There is no doubt that the wave of revulsion among everyday Americans, of all political persuasions, to the videos that we’re seeing from Minneapolis, and Chicago, and other cities targeted by Trump’s paramilitary immigration goons, is real. No amount of gaslighting by Trump and his advisers can prove otherwise. It is also reassuring to observe that the President can feel the need to dial back his power-tripping by something other than the bond market.

But some caution is in order. We are, after all, still living in post-January 6th America. The Donald Trump who could never recover politically from inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol not only recovered but was reëlected President. Does anyone remember now that, on January 7, 2021, he denounced the “violence, lawlessness, and mayhem” committed in his name, while accusing the rioters whom he would later pardon of having “defiled the seat of American democracy”? Trump, in damage-control mode, will do or say anything to get through a crisis—and his words at such a moment have about as much long-term value as a diploma from Trump University. That is the clear lesson from so many previous examples. Don’t unlearn it.

The politics today, I’m sorry to say, do not so far reflect a world in which Trump’s authoritarian overreach in Minneapolis has irrevocably poisoned his Presidency. It’s true that he is a deeply unpopular leader, and that immigration, previously a political advantage for Trump and his party, is now a clear liability. Independents, minority voters, young voters—they are all fleeing in droves from a President whom many of them helped elect a little more than a year ago. And yet, despite the tenor of much political commentary right now, the bottom has not yet fallen out of his Presidency. And maybe it never will. According to CNN’s polling average, Trump’s approval rating is currently thirty-nine per cent and his disapproval rating is fifty-nine per cent, almost exactly what they were in December, before Pretti and Good were killed. This is the case in other surveys as well. A new Fox News poll out this week, for example, had Trump’s approval at forty-four per cent and his disapproval at fifty-six per cent—also unchanged since December.

The point is that Trump’s numbers are bad, but they have been consistently bad, through years of ups and downs and scandals that would have destroyed the careers of any other politician of our lifetime. Americans, by and large, think what they think about Trump, and that’s why history strongly suggests that he can and will muscle his way through this controversy, too. Years from now, long after Trump has forgotten what actually happened in Operation Metro Surge, as his Administration calls the unprecedented surge of immigration agents in Minnesota, will you be shocked if he’s bragging about how he sent in the Feds to knock heads in Minneapolis and what a great job they did cleaning up the place?

There is a Trump playbook for a moment such as this. He’s run it many times before: distraction, disinformation, denial, delay. He’s following it almost to the letter once again. So, before you buy into the idea that the President has been pushed into what Politico on Thursday morning called a “stunning reverse-gear on immigration,” spend a few minutes considering what he and his advisers have actually done and said since Pretti was shot and killed on Saturday.

For starters, Trump himself has stated that he is not pulling back from Minnesota—just making “a little bit of a change” in personnel, by removing the thuggish commander Greg Bovino from the state—and that he neither wants nor needs any restrictions on his national immigration crackdown. “Guardrails would hurt us,” he told Fox News on Tuesday. Despite days of uproar, including from some Republicans, Trump has also stood by the architects of his policy—his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and the embattled Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem. Not only has he not fired Noem but, after two Republican senators demanded that he do so, the President called them “losers.” In Minnesota, there is not yet a clear sign of any withdrawal of federal agents, though Homan has floated the possibility of a “redeployment” if state and local officials coöperate with his demands. It’s the tone that’s shifted so far, not the policy. I’m sure they’re breathing sighs of relief in the White House, now that words like “calming” and “de-escalation” are being thrown about in press coverage.

Trump himself has reverted to his favorite role: distractor-in-chief. At a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, it was as if Minnesota did not exist. Instead, Trump talked about Putin, about Venezuela, about Iran, about housing policy and drug prices and why he had the best first year in the history of the American Presidency. Anything but the topic that has consumed the country—and cratered the Administration’s poll numbers on its most reliable issue—throughout this cold, sad week.

I hope that Chuck Schumer and Jamie Raskin are right, and that this is some kind of a real reckoning for Trump and his Administration. I really do. But at some point, when I could not sleep this week, I made the mistake of looking at the social-media cesspool that is X, and I realized that the most telling data point about how the Trump White House is handling the political furor over Minnesota is hiding in plain sight—on Stephen Miller’s incendiary, mendacious, terrifying feed.

There’s no pivot, no walk-back, not even a political trimming of the sails. No, just the unedited, unexpurgated Miller. It’s all still there, a real-time record of what the man who remains the President’s closest adviser actually thinks: the tweet where, hours after Pretti was gunned down on the street, Miller called him “a would-be assassin who tried to murder federal law enforcement.” The one where he skipped the “would-be” and just straight-out called Pretti “an assassin.” The one where he called what’s happening in Minnesota an “armed resistance” to the federal government. The one where Miller reacted to a federal judge’s ruling in Minnesota by saying, “The judicial sabotage of democracy is unending.”

This, sad to say, is Trump’s Washington as it is right now, not as we might want it to be—a place where loving the President more than anything means never having to say you’re sorry. ♦